Report: FCC Is a Massive Bureaucracy That Can't Handle Complaints Against Telcos - Via Threat Level:

The Federal Communications Commission does an appalling job of tracking complaints about telecommunications services and resolves only a tiny fraction of them, according to a new report released on Thursday from a congressional auditing agency.

"Limitations in FCC's current approach for collecting and analyzing enforcement data constitute the principal challenge FCC faces in providing complete and accurate information on its enforcement program," write the authors of the Government Accountability Office's progress report on the FCC's enforcement efforts between 2003 and 2006, the latest dates for which data was available.

The GAO conducted its investigation of the Republican-led agency between November 2006 and December 2007 at the request of Rep. Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts) who is the chairman of the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet. 

"These limitations make it difficult to conduct trend analysis, determine program effectiveness, allocate Commission resources, or accurately track and monitor key aspects of all complaints received, investigations conducted, and enforcement actions taken," they conclude.

The FCC's enforcement bureau uses five separate databases and "manually searches tens of thousands of paper case files to track and monitor the extent to which each of its divisions takes enforcement action within its statute of limitations requirement for assessing fines or the time it takes to close an enforcement case," they say.

The FCC received about 454,000 complaints between 2003 and 2006. The agency responded to most of the complaints with a letter of acknowledgment. It investigated 10 percent of those complaints over those three years, say the GAO.

It concluded 39,000 of those investigations --and less than 10 percent of them ended with an enforcement action, according to the GAO.

The majority -- 83 percent of the investigations --  resulted in no enforcement action.

The GAO says that it can't determine what happened to the rest of the complaints, nor could it determine why the FCC didn't take enforcement actions in those 83 percent of cases because the agency doesn't collect its information on the investigations systematically.

The GAO's overall conclusion: The FCC needs to set itself measurable goals for its enforcement bureau and to develop the tools to more systematically track its enforcement efforts.

The powerful chairman of the House Energy & Commerce Committee said Thursday that the FCC had "abdicated its duty to protect consumers."

In a statement issued Thursday, Rep. John Dingell (D-Michigan) promised that his committee would "exercise vigorous oversight to ensure that consumers have adequate protections and that the FCC performs its duties in an effective and timely manner."

Most of the complaints over the three years concerned telemarketers violating the federal Telephone Consumer Protection Act, according to the GAO. The complaints were against telemarketers violating consumers' do-not-call requests and calling during "prohibited hours."

The GAO ran its report by the FCC's enforcement bureau before it published its findings.

Not surprisingly, the FCC rejected the GAO's conclusions.

In an undated letter, the agency's enforcement bureau chief Kris Anne Monteith said that the report was riddled with errors, based on outdated information, and also did not look at all of the information that was available.

"During Chairman (Kevin) Martin's tenure, the Commission has undertaken more than 3,400 enforcement actions," writes Monteith. "These enforcement actions have resulted in assessing more than $65.7 million in fines, forfeitures, and consent decree payments -- including more than $43 million in 2007 alone, which the GAO acknowledges is the highest annual amount since the enforcement bureau was created in 1999."

Monteith also states in the letter that the GAO overstates the number of investigations there were concluded with no enforcement action.

The GAO included the letter in its report but stuck to its guns. The data about the FCC's enforcement actions that the GAO investigators had access to wasn't reliable, according to the authors of the report.

Markey used the opportunity to promote a wireless communications consumer protection bill he introduced late February.

"Without an effective FCC enforcement program, consumers are left out in the cold," he said in a statement. "Moreover, the GAO's report makes clear that any legislation establishing national consumer protection rules for the wireless market must have meaningful, supplementary enforcement at the state level."

The report arrives at the same time as the FCC chairman is under investigation by the House Energy & Commerce Committee. On Wednesday, Dingell and the committee's top Republican Joe Barton asked Martin to produce volumes of work-related documents within two weeks.

Staffers on the committee are investigating allegations from current and former FCC employees that Martin is mismanaging the agency.

Agency heads are known to bend with the political winds in D.C., but Martin has garnered an especially strong reputation for exercising tight control over decisions made at the FCC during his tenure -- which has sparked resentment among staffers.

Over the years his style of management has become so well known that Martin himself even joked about it himself during an annual dinner in front of several hundred telecommunications lobbyists and a few unhappy FCC staffers.

(Read Original Article - Via Threat Level.)